Redesigning a Fintech Dashboard That Cut Task-Completion Time by 41%

When a Series B fintech client came to us, their merchant dashboard had become a patchwork of features added over three years without a unifying information architecture. Power users knew workarounds. New merchants abandoned onboarding. Support tickets about navigation and reporting had doubled year-over-year.

The product worked reliably under the hood — settlement times were competitive and uptime was strong. The interface was the bottleneck. Users were doing the hard work that good UX should eliminate.

The Challenge

The dashboard served two distinct user groups: small business owners who logged in weekly to check payouts, and finance teams at larger merchants who lived in the platform daily for reconciliation and reporting. The existing UI treated both audiences identically, burying critical actions under nested menus and surfacing low-priority alerts prominently.

Any redesign had to ship without disrupting live operations for 200,000+ merchants. Downtime was not an option, and the engineering team needed a component-based design system they could implement incrementally.

Our Approach

We embedded with the product team for four weeks of discovery before opening Figma. We ran contextual inquiry sessions with 24 merchants across business sizes, mapped task flows for the six most common jobs-to-be-done, and quantified friction points with time-on-task benchmarks.

• —Restructured navigation around merchant mental models: Money In, Money Out, Reports, Settings
• —Designed role-aware home screens — simplified for SMBs, data-dense for finance teams
• —Rebuilt the settlement and reconciliation flows, reducing steps from seven to three
• —Created a Figma component library with 80+ documented components aligned to the existing React stack
• —Ran two rounds of moderated usability testing with prototype iterations between sessions
• —Partnered with the client's engineering lead on a phased rollout plan to de-risk launch

The Results

The redesigned dashboard launched in phases over six weeks with zero regression bugs reported at go-live. Task-completion time for the core reconciliation workflow dropped 41%. Navigation-related support tickets fell 37% in the first 60 days. Onboarding completion for new merchants improved from 61% to 84%.

The component library became the foundation for the product team's ongoing work — new features now ship faster because design and engineering share a common system.